arXiv subjects

Qun Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Qun Liu.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT

Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT have achieved remarkable performance in many natural language processing tasks.However, these models are both computation and memory expensive, hindering their deployment to resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose TernaryBERT, which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. Specifically, we use both approximation-based and loss-aware ternarization methods and empirically investigate the ternarization granularity of different parts of BERT. Moreover, to reduce the accuracy degradation caused by the lower capacity of low bits, we leverage the knowledge distillation technique in the training process. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark and SQuAD show that our proposed TernaryBERT outperforms the other BERT quantization methods, and even achieves comparable performance as the full-precision model while being 14.9x smaller.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

DynaBERT: Dynamic BERT with Adaptive Width and Depth

The pre-trained language models like BERT, though powerful in many natural language processing tasks, are both computation and memory expensive. To alleviate this problem, one approach is to compress them for specific tasks before deployment. However, recent works on BERT compression usually compress the large BERT model to a fixed smaller size. They can not fully satisfy the requirements of different edge devices with various hardware performances. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic BERT model (abbreviated as DynaBERT), which can flexibly adjust the size and latency by selecting adaptive width and depth. The training process of DynaBERT includes first training a width-adaptive BERT and then allowing both adaptive width and depth, by distilling knowledge from the full-sized model to small sub-networks. Network rewiring is also used to keep the more important attention heads and neurons shared by more sub-networks. Comprehensive experiments under various efficiency constraints demonstrate that our proposed dynamic BERT (or RoBERTa) at its largest size has comparable performance as BERT-base (or RoBERTa-base), while at smaller widths and depths consistently outperforms existing BERT compression methods. Code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model/tree/master/DynaBERT.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Why Skip If You Can Combine: A Simple Knowledge Distillation Technique for Intermediate Layers

With the growth of computing power neural machine translation (NMT) models also grow accordingly and become better. However, they also become harder to deploy on edge devices due to memory constraints. To cope with this problem, a common practice is to distill knowledge from a large and accurately-trained teacher network (T) into a compact student network (S). Although knowledge distillation (KD) is useful in most cases, our study shows that existing KD techniques might not be suitable enough for deep NMT engines, so we propose a novel alternative. In our model, besides matching T and S predictions we have a combinatorial mechanism to inject layer-level supervision from T to S. In this paper, we target low-resource settings and evaluate our translation engines for Portuguese--English, Turkish--English, and English--German directions. Students trained using our technique have 50% fewer parameters and can still deliver comparable results to those of 12-layer teachers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

A General Framework for Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation to Simultaneous Translation

Despite the success of neural machine translation (NMT), simultaneous neural machine translation (SNMT), the task of translating in real time before a full sentence has been observed, remains challenging due to the syntactic structure difference and simultaneity requirements. In this paper, we propose a general framework for adapting neural machine translation to translate simultaneously. Our framework contains two parts: prefix translation that utilizes a consecutive NMT model to translate source prefixes and a stopping criterion that determines when to stop the prefix translation. Experiments on three translation corpora and two language pairs show the efficacy of the proposed framework on balancing the quality and latency in adapting NMT to perform simultaneous translation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

SparTerm: Learning Term-based Sparse Representation for Fast Text Retrieval

Term-based sparse representations dominate the first-stage text retrieval in industrial applications, due to its advantage in efficiency, interpretability, and exact term matching. In this paper, we study the problem of transferring the deep knowledge of the pre-trained language model (PLM) to Term-based Sparse representations, aiming to improve the representation capacity of bag-of-words(BoW) method for semantic-level matching, while still keeping its advantages. Specifically, we propose a novel framework SparTerm to directly learn sparse text representations in the full vocabulary space. The proposed SparTerm comprises an importance predictor to predict the importance for each term in the vocabulary, and a gating controller to control the term activation. These two modules cooperatively ensure the sparsity and flexibility of the final text representation, which unifies the term-weighting and expansion in the same framework. Evaluated on MSMARCO dataset, SparTerm significantly outperforms traditional sparse methods and achieves state of the art ranking performance among all the PLM-based sparse models.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Improving Sequence Modeling Ability of Recurrent Neural Networks via Sememes

Sememes, the minimum semantic units of human languages, have been successfully utilized in various natural language processing applications. However, most existing studies exploit sememes in specific tasks and few efforts are made to utilize sememes more fundamentally. In this paper, we propose to incorporate sememes into recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to improve their sequence modeling ability, which is beneficial to all kinds of downstream tasks. We design three different sememe incorporation methods and employ them in typical RNNs including LSTM, GRU and their bidirectional variants. In evaluation, we use several benchmark datasets involving PTB and WikiText-2 for language modeling, SNLI for natural language inference and another two datasets for sentiment analysis and paraphrase detection. Experimental results show evident and consistent improvement of our sememe-incorporated models compared with vanilla RNNs, which proves the effectiveness of our sememe incorporation methods. Moreover, we find the sememe-incorporated models have higher robustness and outperform adversarial training in defending adversarial attack. All the code and data of this work can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/SememeRNN.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

TensorCoder: Dimension-Wise Attention via Tensor Representation for Natural Language Modeling

Transformer has been widely-used in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and the scaled dot-product attention between tokens is a core module of Transformer. This attention is a token-wise design and its complexity is quadratic to the length of sequence, limiting its application potential for long sequence tasks. In this paper, we propose a dimension-wise attention mechanism based on which a novel language modeling approach (namely TensorCoder) can be developed. The dimension-wise attention can reduce the attention complexity from the original $O(N^2d)$ to $O(Nd^2)$, where $N$ is the length of the sequence and $d$ is the dimensionality of head. We verify TensorCoder on two tasks including masked language modeling and neural machine translation. Compared with the original Transformer, TensorCoder not only greatly reduces the calculation of the original model but also obtains improved performance on masked language modeling task (in PTB dataset) and comparable performance on machine translation tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Learning to Detect Unacceptable Machine Translations for Downstream Tasks

The field of machine translation has progressed tremendously in recent years. Even though the translation quality has improved significantly, current systems are still unable to produce uniformly acceptable machine translations for the variety of possible use cases. In this work, we put machine translation in a cross-lingual pipeline and introduce downstream tasks to define task-specific acceptability of machine translations. This allows us to leverage parallel data to automatically generate acceptability annotations on a large scale, which in turn help to learn acceptability detectors for the downstream tasks. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for a range of downstream tasks and translation models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Probabilistically Masked Language Model Capable of Autoregressive Generation in Arbitrary Word Order

Masked language model and autoregressive language model are two types of language models. While pretrained masked language models such as BERT overwhelm the line of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, autoregressive language models such as GPT are especially capable in natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we propose a probabilistic masking scheme for the masked language model, which we call probabilistically masked language model (PMLM). We implement a specific PMLM with a uniform prior distribution on the masking ratio named u-PMLM. We prove that u-PMLM is equivalent to an autoregressive permutated language model. One main advantage of the model is that it supports text generation in arbitrary order with surprisingly good quality, which could potentially enable new applications over traditional unidirectional generation. Besides, the pretrained u-PMLM also outperforms BERT on a set of downstream NLU tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Dictionary-based Data Augmentation for Cross-Domain Neural Machine Translation

Existing data augmentation approaches for neural machine translation (NMT) have predominantly relied on back-translating in-domain (IND) monolingual corpora. These methods suffer from issues associated with a domain information gap, which leads to translation errors for low frequency and out-of-vocabulary terminology. This paper proposes a dictionary-based data augmentation (DDA) method for cross-domain NMT. DDA synthesizes a domain-specific dictionary with general domain corpora to automatically generate a large-scale pseudo-IND parallel corpus. The generated pseudo-IND data can be used to enhance a general domain trained baseline. The experiments show that the DDA-enhanced NMT models demonstrate consistent significant improvements, outperforming the baseline models by 3.75-11.53 BLEU. The proposed method is also able to further improve the performance of the back-translation based and IND-finetuned NMT models. The improvement is associated with the enhanced domain coverage produced by DDA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

A One-Shot Learning Framework for Assessment of Fibrillar Collagen from Second Harmonic Generation Images of an Infarcted Myocardium

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a scientific term that refers to heart attack. In this study, we infer highly relevant second harmonic generation (SHG) cues from collagen fibers exhibiting highly non-centrosymmetric assembly together with two-photon excited cellular autofluorescence in infarcted mouse heart to quantitatively probe fibrosis, especially targeted at an early stage after MI. We present a robust one-shot machine learning algorithm that enables determination of 2D assembly of collagen with high spatial resolution along with its structural arrangement in heart tissues post-MI with spectral specificity and sensitivity. Detection, evaluation, and precise quantification of fibrosis extent at early stage would guide one to develop treatment therapies that may prevent further progression and determine heart transplant needs for patient survival.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Context-Aware Design of Cyber-Physical Human Systems (CPHS)

Recently, it has been widely accepted by the research community that interactions between humans and cyber-physical infrastructures have played a significant role in determining the performance of the latter. The existing paradigm for designing cyber-physical systems for optimal performance focuses on developing models based on historical data. The impacts of context factors driving human system interaction are challenging and are difficult to capture and replicate in existing design models. As a result, many existing models do not or only partially address those context factors of a new design owing to the lack of capabilities to capture the context factors. This limitation in many existing models often causes performance gaps between predicted and measured results. We envision a new design environment, a cyber-physical human system (CPHS) where decision-making processes for physical infrastructures under design are intelligently connected to distributed resources over cyberinfrastructure such as experiments on design features and empirical evidence from operations of existing instances. The framework combines existing design models with context-aware design-specific data involving human-infrastructure interactions in new designs, using a machine learning approach to create augmented design models with improved predictive powers.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Multi-channel Reverse Dictionary Model

A reverse dictionary takes the description of a target word as input and outputs the target word together with other words that match the description. Existing reverse dictionary methods cannot deal with highly variable input queries and low-frequency target words successfully. Inspired by the description-to-word inference process of humans, we propose the multi-channel reverse dictionary model, which can mitigate the two problems simultaneously. Our model comprises a sentence encoder and multiple predictors. The predictors are expected to identify different characteristics of the target word from the input query. We evaluate our model on English and Chinese datasets including both dictionary definitions and human-written descriptions. Experimental results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and even outperforms the most popular commercial reverse dictionary system on the human-written description dataset. We also conduct quantitative analyses and a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model. All the code and data of this work can be obtained on https://github.com/thunlp/MultiRD.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Deep Learning-Based Feature-Aware Data Modeling for Complex Physics Simulations

Data modeling and reduction for in situ is important. Feature-driven methods for in situ data analysis and reduction are a priority for future exascale machines as there are currently very few such methods. We investigate a deep-learning based workflow that targets in situ data processing using autoencoders. We propose a Residual Autoencoder integrated Residual in Residual Dense Block (RRDB) to obtain better performance. Our proposed framework compressed our test data into 66 KB from 2.1 MB per 3D volume timestep.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Learning to Predict Explainable Plots for Neural Story Generation

Story generation is an important natural language processing task that aims to generate coherent stories automatically. While the use of neural networks has proven effective in improving story generation, how to learn to generate an explainable high-level plot still remains a major challenge. In this work, we propose a latent variable model for neural story generation. The model treats an outline, which is a natural language sentence explainable to humans, as a latent variable to represent a high-level plot that bridges the input and output. We adopt an external summarization model to guide the latent variable model to learn how to generate outlines from training data. Experiments show that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in both automatic and human evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Deep-seismic-prior-based reconstruction of seismic data using convolutional neural networks

Reconstruction of seismic data with missing traces is a long-standing issue in seismic data processing. In recent years, rank reduction operations are being commonly utilized to overcome this problem, which require the rank of seismic data to be a prior. However, the rank of field data is unknown; usually it requires much time to manually adjust the rank and just obtain an approximated rank. Methods based on deep learning require very large datasets for training; however acquiring large datasets is difficult owing to physical or financial constraints in practice. Therefore, in this work, we developed a novel method based on unsupervised learning using the intrinsic properties of a convolutional neural network known as U-net, without training datasets. Only one undersampled seismic data was needed, and the deep seismic prior of input data could be exploited by the network itself, thus making the reconstruction convenient. Furthermore, this method can handle both irregular and regular seismic data. Synthetic and field data were tested to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm (DSPRecon algorithm); the advantages of using our method were evaluated by comparing it with the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) method for irregular data reconstruction and de-aliased Cadzow method for regular data reconstruction. Experimental results showed that our method provided better reconstruction performance than the SSA or Cadzow methods. The recovered signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were 32.68 dB and 19.11 dB for the DSPRecon and SSA algorithms, respectively. Those for the DSPRecon and Cadzow methods were 35.91 dB and 15.32 dB, respectively.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Dialog State Tracking with Reinforced Data Augmentation

Neural dialog state trackers are generally limited due to the lack of quantity and diversity of annotated training data. In this paper, we address this difficulty by proposing a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework for data augmentation that can generate high-quality data to improve the neural state tracker. Specifically, we introduce a novel contextual bandit generator to learn fine-grained augmentation policies that can generate new effective instances by choosing suitable replacements for the specific context. Moreover, by alternately learning between the generator and the state tracker, we can keep refining the generative policies to generate more high-quality training data for neural state tracker. Experimental results on the WoZ and MultiWoZ (restaurant) datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance over the state-of-the-art models, especially with limited training data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

DeepSat V2: Feature Augmented Convolutional Neural Nets for Satellite Image Classification

Satellite image classification is a challenging problem that lies at the crossroads of remote sensing, computer vision, and machine learning. Due to the high variability inherent in satellite data, most of the current object classification approaches are not suitable for handling satellite datasets. The progress of satellite image analytics has also been inhibited by the lack of a single labeled high-resolution dataset with multiple class labels. In a preliminary version of this work, we introduced two new high resolution satellite imagery datasets (SAT-4 and SAT-6) and proposed DeepSat framework for classification based on "handcrafted" features and a deep belief network (DBN). The present paper is an extended version, we present an end-to-end framework leveraging an improved architecture that augments a convolutional neural network (CNN) with handcrafted features (instead of using DBN-based architecture) for classification. Our framework, having access to fused spatial information obtained from handcrafted features as well as CNN feature maps, have achieved accuracies of 99.90% and 99.84% respectively, on SAT-4 and SAT-6, surpassing all the other state-of-the-art results. A statistical analysis based on Distribution Separability Criterion substantiates the robustness of our approach in learning better representations for satellite imagery.

cs.CV↗